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2015-12-02 16:34:04 UTC
Sacrifices to the Savage God
In the Middle Ages, suicide was more wicked than murder. Today we judge it
not morally but medically, as a byproduct of mental illness.
Wall Street Journal
By
JOANNA BOURKE
Nov. 30, 2015
On Feb. 11, 1963, the 30-year-old poet Sylvia Plath tiptoed into her
childrens room, left them some bread and milk, opened their window and
sealed their door, then went into her kitchen and put her head in the gas
oven. Later that morning, a visiting nurse discovered her body. It was not
her first attempt at suicide, but it was successful. A few years earlier she
had written about feeling outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything
but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world.
Into a nest of lovers beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce
of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.
Plath was one of many gifted 20th-century literary figures (including
Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton and Ernest Hemingway) to commit suicide. In 1972
Al Alvarez (poet, critic and friend of Plath) wrote The Savage God in an
attempt to come to terms with her death.
Suicide, he wrote, has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot
be washed out. He lamented the mythologizing of Plaths suicide. The myth
of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her
art, failed to do justice to either her life or her death. He was dismayed
that there seemed to be only two ways of thinking about suicide. The first
was religious, viewing it as a horror, a sin that was more wicked than
murder, since it destroyed the soul as well as the body. The second was
scientific, venerating statistics and objective analyses over individual
maladies or misery.
Suite:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/sacrifices-to-the-savage-god-1448928521
In the Middle Ages, suicide was more wicked than murder. Today we judge it
not morally but medically, as a byproduct of mental illness.
Wall Street Journal
By
JOANNA BOURKE
Nov. 30, 2015
On Feb. 11, 1963, the 30-year-old poet Sylvia Plath tiptoed into her
childrens room, left them some bread and milk, opened their window and
sealed their door, then went into her kitchen and put her head in the gas
oven. Later that morning, a visiting nurse discovered her body. It was not
her first attempt at suicide, but it was successful. A few years earlier she
had written about feeling outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything
but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world.
Into a nest of lovers beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce
of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.
Plath was one of many gifted 20th-century literary figures (including
Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton and Ernest Hemingway) to commit suicide. In 1972
Al Alvarez (poet, critic and friend of Plath) wrote The Savage God in an
attempt to come to terms with her death.
Suicide, he wrote, has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot
be washed out. He lamented the mythologizing of Plaths suicide. The myth
of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her
art, failed to do justice to either her life or her death. He was dismayed
that there seemed to be only two ways of thinking about suicide. The first
was religious, viewing it as a horror, a sin that was more wicked than
murder, since it destroyed the soul as well as the body. The second was
scientific, venerating statistics and objective analyses over individual
maladies or misery.
Suite:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/sacrifices-to-the-savage-god-1448928521